At the heart of this film is Yuko, a young woman who found a sense of purpose for directionless life when she decided to go to Iraq to care for families displaced by the fighting. While there, she was taken hostage by insurgents, narrowly escaping and making her way back to her home town.

The media attention that came her way did not paint her as a hero, though, instead insisting that she brought shame upon her country for either not being killed by her captors or for going over there in the first place. It sounds like an Orwellian set piece, that someone who visits a war torn country for humanitarian reasons would be shunned like that, but as a quick intertitle informs us at the start, this film was based on true events.

All of the events of her time in Iraq are never seen in this film, however, focusing instead on the bleak industrial village that Yuko grew up in and the awful treatment that she and her family suffer through on a daily basis – from angry phone calls and harassment in the street to Yuko's employer dismissing her by deeming her presence a distraction to the rest of her co-workers.

As you can imagine, Bashing is not a terribly hopeful film, but few deeply political films like this are. What it is instead is an unblinking look at the backwards, jingoistic thinking that has distracted so many developed countries in the way of 9/11. It's a gloomy but necessary statement and one that we should all be paying heed to.